remember daughtry | 3/29/25

Welcome to make you think, a newsletter about being alive in the endtimes. If you just signed up, welcome! You can find previous editions of the newsletter right here. If you know someone who might like this, click that little forward button and pass it along!

happy saturday! i'm trying to figure out if friday will continue to be the best publish date for this newsletter. i kind of like the idea of it sliding into your inbox on saturdays – please let me know (in the comments or on bluesky) if you have any opinions!

this week i lost an hour to youtube shorts in a way that felt horrible. i don't even really remember what i watched or how i got into the loop, but if it weren't for a phone call i would've been stuck in there for ages. it felt terrible. the ways that these platforms are intentionally designed to chew through time feels like it should be illegal!

to combat some of this rot, i finally took the step to set up the screen time limits that are built into iOS. this has been tremendously helpful but it is also much too easy to just get another 15 minutes – there's no penalty for doing so (outside of me feeling bad, which is free) so i keep tapping that button. after my depresso hour i downloaded an app called opal, which was selected as an editors choice on the app store. all it does is institute a harder block on apps once you hit the screen time, but for some reason it has a $100/year paid tier? the idea of having to put money into the phone so i don't use the phone is so repulsive to me. a distillation of how cooked we are. we must return to the 3310.

remember daughtry?

there's nothing else to this segment of the newsletter. i just remembered this song and wanted to remind you of it also. i'm not even gonna google where this guy came from. i feel like he got second or third place on american idol? is that right? who knows.

i also played a good chunk of avowed this week – i'm almost done with the game. i talked about it a bunch on the vgbees podcast and bcr this week, but I also streamed a big chunk, which you can check out here. I can't wait to put this game on my game of the year list in december.

today i printed a handful of my photos (an architectural shot, a couple of landscapes, and a couple of self portraits) and they'll end up displayed at tomorrow's trans day of visibility ball here in la. i'll try to get a photo of the install tomorrow but i think this is the first time i've had any of my photography up anywhere outside of the context of school. i'm very nervous! i've kinda gotten over the "am i good at my job" hump (mostly because i have been told by so many different people that i'm good at my job), but now i'm in a different spot where i'm afraid that i'm not good at my hobbies. thankfully i have people in my corner who are really good at ignoring me when i say i'm afraid (positive). fingers crossed people like the jpegs!

ok! that's it! thanks for reading. catch y'all next week.

-

niki